My adventures (and misadventures) in sewing

Argyle Baby Quilt

Since I’m making this one for a baby boy I thought an argyle pattern would be super cute. I found out what they were painting a shelf for his room in blue and orange, so I decided on this color scheme that turned out to really pop. I think it turned out super cute.

Quilt Front

I started out by cutting some 2½” diamonds of each of my colors. I love my slotted ruler, it makes cutting them so much easier. First I cut 2½” strips then i put them on my cutting mat on the 60º line. (See below) Then I lined up my slotted ruler on the straight lines and cut again at every 2½”. This makes perfect 2½” diamonds like you see below on the left.

After I cut all my diamonds, it was time to start sewing. I sew the first 2 patches together after lining up the edges. Yeah, that doesn’t work very well on diamonds. You have to offset the ends by the amount of your seam allowance (¼” in this case) like below.

Then sew…

…and sew some more…

…and keep sewing your strips.

Then iron your seams. I decided to iron each seam towards the beige fabric (since it’s every other one). That way when I sewed the rows together, I had offset seams so it didn’t get too bulky.

Then start sewing together your rows. Remember to keep offsetting here as well. Since i ironed all my seams towards the beige, they alternated and i was able to line up the point of the seam that was sticking out from one row to the other and got the patches to match up pretty well.

Quilt Back

Once I had all the patches sewn together I sewed a strip for the back of the quilt. I wanted to carry over the diamonds/argyle pattern to the back. (I keep trying to make these quilts difficult on myself) I don’t have any pictures of this, but you’ll see the back on the finished quilt later in the post and get the idea.

Quilting

Next I sandwiched together the backing, batting and front patchwork & pinned it all together to get ready to quilt.

I decided on a cute argyle pattern for the quilting. I started off with the idea that I was going to hand quilt with a thicker thread to achieve this pattern. But quickly decided that it wasn’t the greatest ideas since tiny fingers would be holding this and might get stuck.

So I ripped that out and went with an orange thread, that I had in my stash, for the quilting. I think it turned out pretty cute.

Binding

Now for the binding. I decided to do this fun binding I found on (you guessed it) pinterest. I cut 1½” strips from the navy and 1¾” strips from the orange. I sewed them together with a ¼” seam then ironed the sewn strip in half. This gives the look of piping on one side of the binding. I sewed it on like a normal single fold binding.

Final Quilt

I plowed through this one. Finished it in a matter of 5 days. Some not even full days! I think it turned out pretty darn cute.